Serina Cirusico
by kimbari
Summary: A passenger on the Virgon Express the day the world ended, she's nobody and she doesn't matter... for now.
1. Serina

Abbie. Eonla. Psyche. I fill my mind with the memory of them. The scent of them, the sound of them, the way they feel in my arms… the bones in their small bodies… the satin of their dusky skin… the silkiness of their ebon hair. Their little hands on my face. Their voices. _"Momma… Momma, she hit me! Momma, I want, I need, I've got, look at me, Momma, look at me…" _

They drove me mad on a regular basis, when all I wanted was to sculpt, or paint, or draw, there they were: Abbie. Eonla. Psyche. Wanting. Needing. _Look at me._

I would drop my brush, my pencil, my chisel, my knife. I saw to them, resentfully although they were what I wanted. Children of my body, females all, born within 13 months of each other, me still nursing one and the next woman on her way. I wanted that, through the endless days of diapers and puking and crying and messes and trying to get that one perfect stroke of pen, of brush, that last cut into stone. With one girlchild at my breast, another hanging on my leg, and a third tugging at my clothes, I was before all else, an artist.

Abbie. Eonla. Psyche…

Geb. Husband to me and father of my children. He worked hard to keep me and the girls and my art fed, and clothed, and happy. He worked so hard I seldom saw him. Gods help him if he was around when I was in the middle of a project. He would be tasked with the care of the children while I worked, sometimes for days with little food and less sleep while I painted, drew, sculpted… because nothing was more important to me than my art. "It's all good," Geb would say. He would smile. "Some day all your hard work will pay off. Some day, someone will see how talented you are, that the gods' graces are on you. Some day…"

Geb was right. The day came. A show on Caprica. An unreasonably successful show. I sold everything, _everything_. I received commissions for twelve works. The money from the advances alone would pay off all that we owed, with much left over. I would buy my daughters new dresses. I would give my husband time off to rest. Oh, he could rest for a good, long time, my faithful husband, who'd had faith in my art when I sometimes lacked it myself.

I was on my way home to Virgon when the world ended.

Abbie. Eonla. Psyche. Geb. My work. All gone now.

Nothing left but my art. Rattling around in this empty shell of a woman so ugly she frightens children. My art is still with me. My art is still with me and I draw with the pencil stubs and scrap paper that is available to me on this former mass transit vessel that I now call home. I draw…

But I can't remember my children's faces.


	2. Faster Than Light

I quit throwing up by the hundredth but that was only because I gave up trying to eat.

Thirty-three minutes.

I don't know how to do anything besides make babies and works of art, and the former has less to do with ability than biology. I cannot be of help to anyone, not even the mothers of the screaming children. I cannot comfort them because the mark on my face is frightening and upsets them even more.

So I huddle in my seat in a solitary pool of misery and think that I must somehow deserve to be in hell.

I suppose, if you're busy doing other things, the jumps don't really bother you. It's when you just sit there and wait for them, cringing after the announcement (it's a law that they have to tell you to prepare... Geb told me that, once), waiting for space to stretch around you, then snap back like a rubber band. It's the snapback that's disorienting, but by then it's all over and you're light-years away from where you started. And puking into your lap.

The smell of vomit hangs in the air. The children are wailing, the adults, who are only just beginning to realize exactly how much they've lost, sob quietly. I hang on. I've always hung on but before it's been for someone else. My someone elses have ceased to exist, so what do I hang on for? To keep someone who has too much to do already from having to deal with a corpse, I suppose. That's good enough – my will to live must be stronger than I ever imagined.

What lies behind me is mundane beauty I cannot bear to think about – the room where I made my art. ("Studio" was too grand a term for it. It was just a bedroom, and one that rightly belonged to my children.) The sweetly dissonant voices of my girls singing a nursery song. The purple flowers that covered the hills outside my kitchen window for only three glorious days each spring. The feel of Geb's body against me, home again after a long trip. The love we made, the taste and feel and scent and sight and sound of things I'll never sense again.

What lies ahead of me is unknown: Death? Earth?

The next jump.

One hundred and seventeen.


	3. Privation

I knew there would be privation. The end of the world does not mean business as usual. And when things start going wrong, they tend to _keep_ going wrong. That explosion… I've this picture in my head of Hermes covering his ears with his hands against the sudden barrage of prayers. I may draw it someday…

We did not die, but now there is very little water. Washing of anything is forbidden and there's not enough to drink. I remember thirst from nursing my children. I remember it as a desperate sensation. When I first became a mother, in my ignorance of just how much a child takes from you I endangered my health by not drinking enough during one of my creative frenzies. I fainted and when I was brought to and given water, I felt the liquid go directly to my breasts.

I am a creature made to sustain life.

I feel for the nursing mothers on this ship, and I share my water ration with one of them, even though she receives extra because she is nursing. It's not enough. Their pinched faces, hers and her baby's, tell me this. I give up part of my ration and suffer in my own turn. My dry tongue, sticking to the inside of my mouth, is extremely painful. But I have no other life depending on me, so it's not important.

I turn my mind to other things.

The captain of the _Virgon Express_ had a son who was also an artist. When she heard that I was drawing on anything that would accept a graphite mark, she brought me supplies she had purchased on Caprica for her son. "He won't be needing them," she told me, handing me a large package, "but if you're anything like he is…" She stopped at her unwitting use of the present tense to describe one who was almost certainly dead. Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked and they slid down her cheeks. I would weep also, for all our losses, but I'm too dry. "Please take it," she said. Her voice trembled. My throat tightened. "And stop drawing on my bulkheads." She tried to look stern but there was a damp smile behind it. She departed for her duties. I can't thank her, it hurts to talk. I can only hope she saw the gratitude in my eyes.

The package contains charcoal and pastels, pencils, brushes and, ironically, watercolors. I don't even have the spit to make use of those. There are three large eight-cornered pads of deliciously toothed, blank paper. I spread my hands over them, savoring their texture with every ridge in my fingers and palms. I see faintly in the blankness the images of the things I will draw: the little town I lived in, the hills, the trees, the flowers. My memory is odd. Inanimate objects stay. Faces don't. I've heard that there are only fifty thousand Colonials left. Surely enough for me to draw from life.


	4. Colonial Day

I had a friend for life in Jackie after the water crisis ended. She followed me around like a child, not that I minded and not that I went much of anywhere, anyway. I had the tools of creation now so I stayed in my seat and used those tools sparingly. It was likely that once they were used up, there would be no more. It didn't bear thinking about.

A world without art. Life, survival, was the most important thing, of course, but a life without art is not worth living. Certainly not for someone like me, who makes art. And not for Jackie. Her man had been in the military but not on the only military vessel that survived the Cylon attack. She had a nursing baby and life full of uncertainty for herself and little Joe, but when I presented her with a drawing of her son, colored with my precious pastels, I saw delight on her face. _This_ is what we survive for, otherwise we might as well be animals…

Or machines.

They say the Cylons look like us, now, so any one of us could be Cylons. I don't know from Cylons. The last war ended ten years before I was born. Geb's father fought in the war. He used to come to dinner and ramble on for hours about the "toasters" until it was running out of our ears. He frightened Abbie with his tales. She would beg him not to talk about toasters. He would laugh and agree and stay off the subject until he got a snootful (he always brought his own bottle), then it would all come bubbling out like pus from a festering sore that refuses to heal.

I don't wonder what he would think about all that has happened, I know. Forty years and Sy Cirusico had never trusted the peace. Never.

Could the Cylons program themselves to create art? Would they? Or is it as I believe, that creativity is a gift from the gods and far beyond a being's ability to manufacture in itself. At any rate, I have no time for paranoia. I feel I might have something to live for now, a mission: To seek out what beauty there is, to capture it with the means at my disposal, and to give it back to what's left of the world.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Jackie wants me to go with her to the Colonial Day party on Cloud Nine.

"I don't know, love," I tell her. "I'm not the party type."

"Well, if you don't want to dance, you can look after Joe for me while _I_ dance. Please, Serina, pleeeease?" She did a little begging dance that reminded me so much of Eonla when she wanted something that I had to laugh.

"You are worse than my children…" I stopped talking because I suddenly remembered that my children were no more. Jackie saw my face change. She hung her head for a moment, but then she said,

"It'll do you good to get away from this ship. Cloud Nine is a luxury vessel, with grass and trees and stuff. And sunshine," she added, as if that were a clincher.

I was amused. "I thought the party's going to be in the evening."

Jackie put her hands on her hips impatiently. "Well, the grass and trees and stuff are still there. It'll be like being back home."

"Oh, I doubt that seriously," I told her. "But I'll go and watch Joe while you dance." And I thought I would bring my sketch pad and perhaps capture some beauty.

"Ooooh, thank you so much, Serina!" She hugged and kissed me. I hugged her back and she went off to put her outfit together.

I stay in the shadows at gatherings. Jackie is used to my face and Joe is too young to care. But most people gasp and stare when they see the mark and sometimes small children are so frightened, they burst into tears. The mark is blue and purple and red, with tiny black spots where the pores are. It's shaped like a handprint, fingers stretching into my hairline. I look as if the Lords, all left-handed, had each taken a turn slapping my face for some heinous transgression. The mark deforms my features: it pulls at my eye, my nostril, and the corner of my mouth, as burn would. The mark isn't a burn, though. It's a birthmark.

My face had repulsed people all my life, but the rest of me isn't too bad, although I tend to thinness and now I am especially gaunt with the short rations. I do have pretty hair. It's long and wavy and the color of deep, dreamless sleep. I wear it in 24 braids (a family tradition) and I get lots of exercise stretching my arms upwards as I plait them and tie the ends in a knot. I drape my braids over my face in an attempt to shield the world from it.

My mother never thought any man would ever want me, but I found Geb Cirusico and he found me. Geb enabled me to make my art and we'd made three babies together and then the Cylons took all that away from me. But I can't think about that now. I can't think about that _ever_, because if I do I will surely go mad.

"Are you going to wear _that_?" Jackie said. We were making ready to leave for the shuttle, and she eyed my baggy bib-alls and the now miles-too-big sweater that I had bought at the spaceport in Caprica City for my trip home as if they were going to haul off and bite her.

I told her my ball gown was at the cleaners. She let it go and put the baby in his carry basket while I gathered up my drawing pad and pencils. And so we went.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

The lights were low in the ballroom, and the music wasn't too loud. Joey could sleep and I could sit in the shadows and watch and draw.

Those dancing were mostly rich people, and politicians, and military elite. Important people, those whose voices we hear over the wireless. They were dressed in their best which, for many of them, wasn't a whole lot more impressive than what I had on, although some of the women (like Jackie) had managed to make glamorous do with what they had.

I sat in my corner with the sleeping baby and I watched: faces that I would not remember once I left this place, the twist of bodies, the laughter, the talk, the meaningful looks and the meaningless ones. I filled my eyes with them, with humanity, and from within my trance I transcribed them.

I didn't know these people, but to draw them I have to look very deeply, so I saw their hearts.

I'd done five drawings and was very sleepy when Jackie finally tired of dancing. She and her baby were the perfect couple; he woke up hungry and her breasts were full. She decided to feed him before we took the shuttle back to our ship and she looked at my drawings while I tried to keep my eyes open.

"That's the President," she told me, pointing to a drawing I'd done of a pretty woman dancing with a stern-faced man in a uniform.

"Who is, that man?" I asked.

Jackie looked at me as if I were stupid. I suppose I was. "The woman. Our President is a woman, Laura Roslin. President Adar died in the attack."

"I haven't been paying attention, I guess," I said, pulling the pad toward me to look closely at the drawing. _It's too much,_ I thought, staring at the slight, sweet smile on the woman's face.

"What's too much?" Jackie wanted to know. I hadn't realized I'd spoken out loud.

"She has to decide what's best for all of us and it's really too much and… she's not…" I stopped talking. I had no way of knowing _anything_ about her, except when I looked at people to draw them, I could see their hearts.

"All of this has happened before…" Jackie murmured, and that snapped me out of my trance. I looked over at her. She sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking and nursing her baby. She stared into his little face, unaware that she had spoken.

"And all of this will happen again," I finished.

"So say we all," Jackie mused. She disconnected her son and put him to her shoulder, rubbing his back to help him get his bubble out. That reminded me of nursing Psyche, and how hard she was to burp, and I clenched my hands in sudden agony. I wanted to be dead. I wanted my soul to be with the souls of my children. To what purpose had the gods spared my life? I was ugly and useless, skilled at nothing but making pictures.

"Keeping us human," Jackie said.

"What?" I had closed my eyes under the sudden onslaught of grief and when I opened them she was staring at me.

"The gods spared your life because I need you. Joe and I would've died if you hadn't shared your water…"

"Someone else would have…"

"No one else would have, Serina." She shook her head. "No one cared. Only you. And you make such good pictures." She stared at my drawings and pointed. "So pretty… that looks exactly like the President." She looked up at me. "I'll bet it's the only drawing of President Roslin that exists… That's important."

I wiped my sudden, foolish tears away. "You're right," I told my young friend. "You're always right."

Jackie snorted. "I'm _never_ right. I wanted to stay another day on Caprica but my mother insisted I come home, _now_." Joe burped and Jackie pulled him off her shoulder and stared into his face. He smiled at her. "Maybe she knew."

"We were all where we were supposed to be that day," I said. I sighed, gathered up my drawings and placed them carefully back between the covers of the pad. "Let's go…"

I almost said "home." How adaptable we humans are. Two months in space and a couple of seats on a commuter ship had become home.


	5. Abandoned

I was in the bath room, alone for once, naked with my wash-water ration and soap and towel when the announcement of the emergency jump came. Great. The last time we jumped I got puke up my sinuses because I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I could hold it in. I can only get clean once a week and I just got clean!

And I puked. Oh, well, at least I was near a toilet this time, leaving my clean body none the worse for wear. I'm bleeding right now, for the first time since the world ended, and my body appears to be making up for all that lost time. This is a really _bad_ time for me to be on bath rations but what can you do? There's only so much water. We're lucky we get the gallon a week of reclaimed water (little better than disinfected gray water) to wash in at all.

It hurts when I think how much I used to love showers. And, obsessive artist me, I usually found better things to do than bathe, anyway, so I never got around to it until the stink could be seen. So then I would spend... oh, it seemed like _days_ in the shower, with the body scrub and soap that smelled like fruit blossoms and the warm spray of water, washing my hair (it's been a while since I've done _that_), my feet and every part in between. I closed my eyes, remembering the loving attention I'd get from Geb after cleaning up. He'd just get me all dirty again...

No use thinking about that, now. I put on my dirty clothes (we can choose: clean body or clean clothes, there's not enough water for both) and went back to the space I shared with Jackie and Joe. Jackie was sitting up, wild-eyed. There were worse things than waking up in the middle of an FTL jump but I didn't want to know what they were. At least _she_ could keep her rations down.

"What the hell?" she said. "The Cylons again?"

"What else would we be making an emergency jump for." I scrounged around for my stash of crackers, swiped from the Colonial Day buffet tables on _Cloud_ _Nine_. They would hold me until lunch... and if they didn't well, it was just too damn bad, wasn't it?

"This will never end!" she wailed, and dived back under the blanket. Joe slept on without a murmur.

I didn't respond. We'd survived jumping every half hour for five days. The fleet had lost only one ship and it had to be destroyed because the Cylons put a nuke aboard. So Captain Zaria had told me once, presumably in confidence. (She was pretty hammered at the time.) We'd survived and we would keep on surviving, so long as we had _Galactica_ to protect us. So Zaria said. So say we all, but I had heard murmurings, rumors of political unrest, that loudmouth Marsh Bagot yapping... We're washing our faces in gray water and barely have enough to eat, I think there are larger issues than who holds a seat on the Quorum!

Sometimes I wonder that _Galactica_ doesn't just cut and run and leave us all behind rather than taking Cylon fire and losing troops for these silly people, for us.

Sometimes I wonder if we're worth it. And sometimes I wonder if there's a reason it's taking so long to get to the Promised Land.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

There's a rumor going around that _Galactica_ didn't make that emergency jump with the rest of the fleet. No one knows if they were destroyed or... Maybe the gods heard what I said about us being worth it.

The gods certainly picked a fine time to start listening to me.


	6. Crossquarter

Jackie is joining the military.

"They're going to work with me," she said, when I asked her what she was going to do about her nursing son. "They lost so many people during that battle with the Cylons..." She trailed off, shuddering. It occurred to me to ask her why she didn't think such a thing might happen again but I didn't because I _knew_ it hadn't occurred to her. She'd heard they needed people on Galactica and she had the skills they were looking for and to hell with the fact that she had a very young baby who also needed her. I was eight years older than Jackie but sometimes I felt more like I was fifty years older.

"Who's going to look after Joe?" I asked her.

"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about..." she began.

I looked at her. "Why do you want to talk to _me_ about it?" I could see her coming from a mile away but I just wanted to be sure.

"I want you..."

"No," I said.

"Why not? Joe loves you..."

"Joe is three months old, he doesn't know enough to love anybody."

"All right then, he likes you..."

"Jackie, the answer is no."

"Why not?" Jackie got this mulish expression on her face. Did she think she was going to _make_ me her babysitter? I decided to talk to her as if she really were an adult.

"Listen, Jackie, you don't want me to watch over Joe..."

"Of course I do!" she said. "I wouldn't want anyone else, I wouldn't trust anyone else."

"Jackie, you do NOT want me watching over your kid," I told her. "I'm lousy at it."

"Oh, bullshit, Serina! You had kids, you know perfectly well how to..."

"Where are they now?" I screamed at Jackie and it seemed like the vibration from my voice stilled the hum of the ship itself. "My kids are dead! What kind of mother am I if I let my kids die?"

My heart was pounding and my throat hurt, I'd screamed so hard. At the place where my soul lived was a huge, burned out hole, and somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered what was keeping me upright. That very moment it quit on me and I went down.

Jackie dropped to the floor with me. She tried to embrace me, but I pulled away.

"Serina... you didn't let them..."

"They're gone, Jackie," I whispered and I realized that, until that very moment, that fact had been abstract. I don't deal in abstract. I work from life.

"It's not your fault," Jackie said.

What in gods name did she know? "I'm not going to look after Joe," I told her. I folded myself and rested my chin on my knees. "You'll have to find someone else." I closed my eyes, as if that would make her go away.

"Yeah, sure," she muttered. I could hear other people around me, attracted by my screaming, murmuring their concern. They probably thought I was a Cylon agent. I would have laughed if that had been funny. Jackie got up and left me there, sitting in a fetal position in the middle of the floor.

I wanted to die.

My sweet little girls whose faces I couldn't remember. Had the Lords of Kobol taken my daughters' souls to themselves like it says in the scriptures? Geb had believed in them with all his heart but I took it with a grain of salt, even before the end of the world.

And speaking of the end of the world, where had the Lords been then?


	7. Kobol

_I dreamed of Geb. I dreamed of him praying to the Lords of Kobol as he had when Eonla was sick. He made offerings and spent countless hours on his knees appealing to the Lords in general, and to Lord Apollo the healer in particular. And when Eonla got worse, he switched Lords and made his petition to Hera. In my dream I saw my husband, on one knee, two fingers to his forehead. A female hand reached out and touched his head in benediction. Eonla was healed, but I put no credence in the gods' intervention. The infection she'd harbored had simply run its course. I tried to explain this to Geb, but he only smiled at me patiently, believer to non-believer. Where is your proof, I asked him and he said a single word._

_Kobol._

I opened my eyes...

It was early morning, ship's time. People were stirring around me, waking up, because there was a message coming over the speakers. It was the voice of Captain Zaria. She sounded as if she were reading something:

_...play my part in the plan. Therefore, at the appointed hour, I will give the signal to the fleet. All those wishing to honor the gods and walk the path of destiny will follow me back to Kobol... _

I looked around quickly, not sure I wasn't still dreaming. Kobol? It wasn't a word that was used lightly.

"Did she say Kobol?" It was Nesta, the woman who Jackie had persuaded to watch her baby after I refused. Nesta jounced the infant nervously on her knee while he slobbered over his fist. She looked as unsettled as I felt. Before I could say anything, the Captain continued her announcement, no longer reading.

"This ship is going to Kobol," Captain Zaria said. "Anyone who does not wish to go should debark immediately. That is all."

There was silence, followed by the incoherent murmuring of freshly woken people. "I thought Kobol was a myth," I said, to no one in particular.

Nesta looked awed. "It's the home of the gods," she said. She put two fingers to her forehead. It was Geb's gesture in my dream and it unnerved me.

"Follow who?" I said. Between the dream and the captain's vaguely threatening announcement I could feel myself beginning to unravel. Not that there was much warp and woof to begin with.

"The Prophet," Nesta said at the same time a man whose name I'd never learned said, "President Roslin. They say she's dying."

"Just like in the scriptures," Nesta said reverently. "'A dying leader will--'"

"It's bullshit," the man said, gathering his things together. "And the gods take care of those who care for themselves. _I'm_ not going to Kobol..."

"If it's bullshit then what difference does it make if you go or not?" Nesta asked, pretty reasonably I thought. The man looked at her as if he'd like to kill her, then picked up his swag and stomped off.

"Where's he gonna go?" I said, watching his departing back. This ship was the only home I had, now. I would not be leaving it unless it was feet first or to live on a new world far away from Cylons who wanted to kill me although I had done nothing to them.

"Who knows?" Nesta said, getting heavily to her feet. She balanced the baby on her hip. "I have to try to contact this boy's mother. I don't think _Galactica_ will be following anybody."

I put my hand to my mouth. Oh, no. What about Jackie and her baby? Jackie had turned her back on me when I refused to take care of Joe while she went to be of military service. I hadn't said I wouldn't watch Joe because I didn't care, but because I _did_ care, but Jackie didn't hear me and she had cut me off. Nesta was a good woman but she was old and creaky and barely up to the task. I had a feeling that Joe was going to fall into my hands anyway, no matter what I wanted or said or did. But how could I care for another's child when I'd done so badly by my own?

Iheard the people talk about President Roslin. (_"The woman," _Jackie had said, the night I'd drawn a woman dancing with a stern-faced man_. "Our President is a woman."_) I heard them say she was crazy. I heard them say she took drugs. She was a politician, you can't trust them. I heard them say she was the prophet sent by the gods to guide us to our salvation. I'd also heard that the military knew where Earth was, so what was all this about salvation? I listened but I didn't understand.

I got up and folded my blanket and put my shoes on. I decided not to eat breakfast. We were going to jump and you don't make as big a mess when you puke if your stomach is empty.


End file.
